He sneaked in through the cat flap, the wild raccoon in the TV commercial last Christmas, and placed a lost present under the Christmas tree. Christmas was saved for the Dutch TV family. That was fiction. But the real Dutch raccoon that recently crawled into the house through the cat flap NRCreader Saskia Wielders from Urmond aan de Maas did something different.
She writes: “In the middle of the night I heard a loud commotion in the living room at the end of November. I feared that one of my cats had brought in live prey on its nightly escapades. So I lay there cowardly, hoping that the nasty job would still be done. When the crashing became so bad that things were falling over and there was a lot of glass shattering, we went to have a look. To our surprise, a nervous raccoon was walking in the living room, eagerly looking for the exit, i.e. cat flap! We managed to chase him out the back door. In addition to a havoc of shards, the raccoon left behind an empty cat food bowl. The cat flap has now been replaced by one that works on the cats’ chip. No more raccoons in our house!”
Raccoon opens refrigerator
Wielders responded with this report to the call on the Achterpagina at the end of December, in which we asked readers to describe their experiences with Dutch raccoons. This is in response to the Christmas raccoon TV commercial. She was the only one of the twelve entrants who had had eye contact with a Dutch raccoon. At Charles van Eijck’s, a raccoon had taken apple juice from the refrigerator in the warehouse, judging by the paw marks. The other entrants reminisced about raccoons in zoos, raccoon cuddly toys, or foreign raccoons, especially in America, where the animal originally comes from.
Urmond, where Wielders lives, is located in the thinnest part of Limburg, between Germany and Belgium, where there are large, growing wild raccoon populations.
Shooting does not inhibit growth
The animal, once released for fur, is now native in Germany. About 1.5 million raccoons live there, and the population is growing there every year, according to the Aap animal shelter foundation, by about 20 percent – while hundreds of thousands are shot every year. Their numbers are also growing in Belgium: in the Belgian Ardennes, where reader Annelies Vermeulen lives, she believes this is damaging nature, because they eat frogs and toads from forest lakes, among other things.
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The Netherlands is an ideal raccoon country
According to a European directive, the raccoon has been a harmful invader in the Netherlands since 2016, an ‘invasive exotic species’, that must be combated. Provinces can decide for themselves how. The Aap Foundation captured hundreds more Limburg raccoons in 2022 to prevent them from being killed. But they stopped doing that because they couldn’t handle the power.
At Aap they believe that the government should arrange shelter. The foundation is according to their website against shooting – that doesn’t help, see Germany. And they do not consider it ethically responsible to shoot animals that have nothing to do with the fact that they were released into Europe. No one knows how many raccoons already live in the Netherlands: hundreds are estimated. There are experts who argue that the raccoon is already native. Or be quick, because: The Netherlands is an ideal raccoon country. Hence the urgent call from the Aap Foundation to policymakers: “shape the EU policy for invasive exotic species in a European context in an animal-friendly manner.” Leaving this responsibility to provinces and animal shelters “is a stopgap measure and not a solution to prevent further spread of these exotic species,” according to the Aap Foundation.